Fembots Are Coming, Fembots Are Coming

Are we sexualizing our robots? And is the preponderance of feminized bots the proof that we are not only sexualizing our robots, but that females are the most sexualized of the two biological genders? Signs point to maybe?

The fembot has long been a pop culture fixation, but now feminized tech is all around us. Digital helpmeets like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana are fitted with nonthreatening feminine voices and programmed to respond to sexist comments with cutesy repartee. (If you tell Siri to make you a sandwich, she replies: “I can’t. I have no condiments.”) Creepy techno-Pygmalion stories — like the one about the guy who 3-D-printed his own Scarlett Johansson bot on his patio — captivate the online news landscape. With the help of machine learning, a community of Redditors are creating highly realistic fake porn that melds famous actresses’ faces onto porn performers’ bodies. Twitter lit up with crazed sex-robot memes last month after images of a new sex doll styled as an Instagram model (swollen lips, thick thighs and an athleisure-lingerie uniform) went viral.

Paul Gordon is the publisher and editor of iState.TV. He has published and edited newspapers, poetry magazines and online weekly magazines.
He is the director of Social Cognito, an SEO/Web Marketing Company. You can reach Paul at pg@istate.tv